Archaeologists found six new sacrificial pits and uncovered over 500 cultural relics dating back about 3,000 years at the Sanxingdui Ruins in Sichuan province in March 2021. Artefacts including gold masks, gold foil, bronze masks, bronze trees have since been unveiled to the public. These rare and dazzling items with ancient imaginations about the universe once again showed the distinctiveness and creativity of the Shu culture, and, more importantly, the diversity and inclusiveness of the Chinese civilization. Naturally, the city where these pieces were discovered has again been put into spotlight.

Growing up in Guanghan, a small county-level city located in the northeast of Chengdu Plains, I never found my hometown special when I was young, even though the Sanxingdui Ruins, a major Bronze Age culture lying dormant for over 3,000 years, had already stunned the world and the city was pretty well-known. Local people just went about their business as usual, and occasionally some traces of the past can be found. Even notable historical figures are few and far between.

During the Three Kingdoms period (220-280), Pang Tong (179-214), an advisor and military strategist to Liu Bei (161-223), founder of the state of Shu Han (221-263), was said to have been shot dead here. Fang Guan (697-763), a chancellor in the Tang dynasty (618-907), once lived in the city when he was demoted to serve as the local prefect, and Du Fu (712-770), a close friend of Fang’s, visited Fang after he also fell out of favor with the emperor.

Into the Republican years, an influential figure of Guanghan’s own was finally born. The Guanghan native Dai Jitao (or Tai Chi-t’ao) became the first head of Examination Yuan of the Republican government. In 1941, when China’s resistance war against Japan was waging on, Dai called for the compilation of Guanghan’s annals, especially photographing the city’s architecture as its ancient buildings were fast disappearing at the time. Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) and Liu Zhiping (1909-1995), two of the foremost architects from the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture, were drafted for the job. The result? A total of 560 photos detailing Guanghan. Based on these photos, with further annotations, Xiao Yi has now written and published the book A City of Shadows: Liang Sicheng and Guanghan in 1939-1941.

Throughout the 20th century, the faces of Chinese cities underwent unprecedented changes amid China’s ups and downs. The undue glorification of modernization, a result of the dramatic impact of the Western culture, coupled with wars and political movements, all but destroyed China’s traditional architecture. As Liang Sicheng once lamented: “The old cities in pure Chinese-style beauty or grandeur either have been completely demolished or have only the skeletons left.” Fortunately for Guanghan, the city’s old architecture and even folk customs have been preserved through Liang Sicheng’s photos, its past immortalized in these precious pictures.

Walls and moats around square-like city, the Confucian Temple, the Kuixing (God of Literature) Pavilion, the Assembly Halls of different provinces with distinct regional features, and the ancestral halls…each and every essential element of an ancient Chinese city has been restored in Xiao Yi’s book through photos and words. More crucially, while the author’s annotations on the photos focus on architecture, rich details, including legends, historical facts, classical allusions, folklores, have been expertly interwoven into the text. For example, when writing the Confucian Temple in Guanghan, the author dwells not only on the merits of the temple itself, but also delves into the evolution of the Confucian Temple throughout Chinese history: how the Duke Ai of Lu during the Spring and Autumn period was the first ruler to commemorate Confucius, how the founder of the Han dynasty was the first emperor to hold the memorial ceremony for Confucius, and how the architectural layout of the Confucian Temple was fixed in the Qing dynasty.

It is more than a book of architecture; to some extent, it is also a book of Chinese cultural history.

Ultimately, it is people that have made these exquisite buildings come alive. Under the city gate with a double-eave hip-and-gable roof, a farmer in a bamboo hat was brushing past an itinerant peddler shouldering pieces of cloth. A gray-headed old man was drying out clothes under the eaves. A local opera was playing on the stage at the bottom of the Bell and Drum Tower… In those silent black-and-white photos, the noise and din of the colorful city life seem reverberating.

To me, the book, and the names of the places in the book, lends a personal touch. Huashi Street (Flower Market Street), Mishi Street (Rice Market Street), Shuyuan Street (Academy Street)…whenever these familiar names appear in the book, they tug at my heartstrings, memories buried deep in my mind popping up like fishermen’s lights at night. Even for those readers who have never set foot in Guanghan, I believe they would have similar emotions, for this is the epitome of a peaceful and happy Chinese life, transposable to any city or town in China.

Now, as we read A City of Shadows, we may well say that what Liang Sicheng and Liu Zhiping left behind is not merely what the architecture of Guanghan used to look like; it is more an embodiment of ancient Chinese cities and the interactions between man and cities hidden in these ancient buildings. The shadows are overlaps between Guanghan in 1941 and Guanghan right now; they are also the shadows of old Chinese cities, from which all of their modern reincarnations can find resonance.